josh rank

The Shovel

I was sure he was dead at least four times before I felt confident enough to tell my wife. His little body was still, but the breaths had been shallow ever since we put him in the cardboard box. Then I noticed the blood leaking from beneath the tail. That hadn’t been there when I last checked if the heat lamp was actually providing any comfort.

Turns out it wasn’t.

Maybe the worms we had cleaned out of the wound in his neck weren’t the extent of the parasites he gained over the few hours he lay helpless beneath the oak tree in our backyard. The flies had given him enough attention that anything was possible.

And all I knew at this point was that the two hours we spent—scraping the eggs from his hairless body that would turn into maggots if left unattended, coaxing out those worms we could see pulsating beneath his near-translucent skin, cleaning him off as carefully as possible—hadn’t made a difference in how his story would end.

It wasn’t a surprise. The way it ended. The surprise came from how much it hurt.

I was maybe seven years old when my dad found a family of cats living beneath a dilapidated van near a cabin. The mother had been found dead. The kittens were too young to get any food on their own. They had open sores and seemed to be in pain. He knew the most humane thing to do was to grab the shovel leaning against the side of the cabin.

My mom was shocked when I told her I didn’t want to leave before he went to work.

“Of everybody, you shouldn’t be here for this,” she told me.

And it wasn’t just because I was young but because she knew it would be devastating.

I had a pet rabbit for three days before it had seizures and died in front of me. I told myself I wouldn’t eat for a week to honor him.

I’d watch every piece of road kill through the windshield, out the passenger window, and as it disappeared into the distance out the back window. I learned to make the joke, “Aw, it needs a hug.” But the real joke of it was it wasn’t a joke at all.

Decades went by. I stopped feeling sorry for road kill. I shrugged more and accepted things with a fatalistic indifference.

Things are going to happen.

There’s nothing you can do.

The chaotic essence of society, nature, and the world as a whole began to make more sense. Chaos is the only way to explain everything with finality. There are no surprises when you truly believe that anything can happen at any time.

It’s the same reason people base their lives around religion—it’s an easy answer to an unanswerable question. You can’t refute someone’s faith.

And you can’t argue with chaos. You can try to find patterns to dismiss it, but you’ll fail.

Chaos is the only absolute truth of the world.

Your worldview hardens.

And then something happens that doesn’t challenge this antagonistic interpretation of daily events but alludes to a crack in the protective layer it had established.

It wasn’t the squirrel that had been found in the backyard, hours old and covered in opportunistic flies.

It was the adolescent sparrow that just wasn’t quick enough.

The love of animals that flowed through me since I was small enough to climb into a car without ducking had never left. My recognition of my capacity for empathy and the ability to be affected by arguably small instances of loss had been dulled.

But that didn’t stop me from adopting two dogs of my own.

One of these dogs is a stuffed animal that had been brought to life through voodoo. She’s gentle. She’s uninterested in the normal trappings of her species—squirrels, birds, other dogs.

But the other one—he’s a caricature of a dog. He’ll chase a ball until his legs fall off. He’ll scream out the front window at anything that moves. And he runs after birds.

Enter the adolescent sparrow.

I noticed my dog beneath a small tree, acting like he does with his toys—attention down, thrashing side-to-side, refusing to acknowledge me at all.

The bird was still alive when I finally ran over.

Images of the dilapidated van near the cabin and the tiny shrieks of doomed kittens exploded in my head.

The bird flipped this way, then rolled that way.

Just die, I thought.

There was a shovel in the garage behind me, but I didn’t want to get it.

Finally, the bird stopped moving. Relief briefly flowed through my veins. I’d only need the shovel for cleanup. And then another, unexpected wave flowed through me.

Sadness.

The dulled emotions of unreasonable love from my youth throbbed to life.

But why?

I quickly cleaned up the area and buried the brief beacon of light that flashed in my chest that afternoon.

And then less than two weeks later and ten yards away, I found the squirrel.

A quick internet search told me to leave it where it was and hope the mother would find it. So I did what I was told. But when I returned a few hours later, the mother had not found it.

The flies did.

His body didn’t fill my palm. Small, yellow fly eggs clung to his belly, beneath the folds of his arms and legs, and at the base of the tail. Something had opened a wound in his neck which we’d come to find full of minuscule worms.

It took hours.

The squirrel only made the tiniest of protestations. Short squeaks fell from his mouth as we scraped off the eggs, removed the worms, and gently washed him between my gloved hands.

My lungs drew short, staccato breaths. My eyes darted between the instruments and the task.

I had hoped the mother would’ve saved me from getting the shovel, but chaos doesn’t grant wishes.

The shovel was the most compassionate option. That was obvious from the sweater of flies that covered the newborn squirrel when I returned that afternoon. But I couldn’t do it. The adolescent bird had been the first puncture in the hardened shell that grew over decades of convincing myself nothing mattered. And now that little boy that had been shielded from the euthanization of orphaned kittens had broken through.

Finally, we couldn’t see any more worms, the eggs were gone, and the squirrel was cleaned. A box from an unknown delivery was reconstructed and a bed was made from a Christmas-themed hand towel. Sunday nights weren’t a fruitful time to call wildlife rehabilitation facilities, so it was up to us to get him through the night.

A desk lamp and the highest-watt bulb we had on hand became a heat lamp. There was no need to worry about his eyes since a layer of skin would cover them for another four weeks.

We checked to make sure it wasn’t too hot.

We checked back to see if it was hot enough.

Two dogs in the house means we’re accustomed to the whims of an animal drastically changing the mood of a room in an instant. But the addition of an injured, fragile, newborn wild animal electrified the air.

We had taken the hairless squirrel through the tough part of the day—essentially performing surgery on him—and now all he had to do was stay warm enough and keep breathing until morning.

And then I noticed the blood leaking out from beneath the tail.

His little ribs no longer pulsated with shallow breaths.

He didn’t reposition himself when I shifted the towel.

I finally called my wife into the room and broke the news.

“What should we do?” she asked.

I stood up.

“Throw it in the garbage, I guess.”

She shook her head. “But the flies.”

It was the flies that laid those eggs, that created that wound on his neck, that were responsible for the worms that crawled beneath his skin.

He didn’t deserve to fall from the tree, and he definitely didn’t deserve to be feasted upon by flying insects for hours until he was too damaged to stay alive in a warm bed.

He also didn’t deserve to be thrown right back to them when it was all over.

We spoke in the kitchen. What should we do? We can’t just toss him back to the outdoors that was so unkind to him from the moment he was born. Chaos teaches us that this is simply the way it goes. You can’t change it and you shouldn’t allow yourself the remorse of having tried.

But he didn’t deserve that.

Instead, we closed the lid of the box and brought it into the backyard. I gently set it into the hole I dug out the previous year and surrounded it with scrap pieces of concrete. I built a quick structure around the box of twigs and branches that had fallen from the same tree as the squirrel. And then I lit it on fire.

We stood there—my wife and I—apologizing to the young squirrel until the box had finally burned through.

It was dusk at this point. A faint glimmer of the nestled sun hung in the air and only reflected off the tallest clouds.

It had been less than nine hours since I had first found the defenseless squirrel next to the tree.

The kittens in the dilapidated van next to the cabin.

The rabbit that shook itself to death in its cage.

The adolescent bird that just wasn’t fast enough.

And the squirrel that fell from its mother’s protection.

They didn’t deserve the ending they got. Chaos isn’t enough of a reason to accept it as fact. You don’t always get wiser as you get older. You get less idealistic. The capacity for empathy and a desire to make things better doesn’t need to be left only to those too young to know better.